One in eight pages accessed on the Internet in the U.S. today are viewed on mobile devices, according to a report by comScore. Mobile phones account for 9 percent of Internet visits and tablets make up another 4 percent. It begs the question: What sort of experience are those mobile users being served?

Mobile users are a demanding group. They want information tailored to their small screens that they can actually read and transact with, and they want it now. Strangeloop Networks provides optimization and web performance services for mainly enterprise-level companies. Its CEO, Jonathan Bixby, said, “The latest mobile user surveys tell us that two out of three mobile shoppers expect sites to load in four seconds or less.” Tablet users expect even greater load speed at three seconds per page.

Interestingly, when Strangeloop conducted a test of 200 leading ecommerce sites, not only did mobile load times over 4G networks fall short of expectations, but desktop load times did as well. In fact, desktop load times tested were a mere one second faster than Android smartphone load times over the same networks….